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Totally brilliant concept! A game based on the anarchic cult comedy programme The Young Ones. Crazy! Fascist! Snot! Willybotrot!

I was a Young Ones fan, but it's funny how, when you write it down, the humour starts to sound a bit weak, a bit, well, childish. That's a problem, but perhaps not as much a problem as trying to get the humour over in the first place.

Mosaic had a good stab at it with Adrian Mole, but that was done in an adventure format. It was based on a book and hence quite texty. Orpheus' effort at the Young Ones tries to do it as an arcade style adventure, sort of Wally style. The result is a disaster.

The idea behind the game is to play one of the characters and collect seven or eight items that will enable you to move out of the house. You control your character via screen options. Thus at every occasion you pull the joystick back to select action, speech or walking. You have no real control over movement apart from setting it off.

The worst part is the other characters just wander around saying the same things about objects. "Nobody move until Mike the coolperson picks up the thermos flask", is not funny especially after endless repetition.

My character (Vyvyan) just kept saying things like "I've got a really bad hangover, and all I can think about is picking up the guitar case". I took this as a prompt so I got him to pick it up, whereupon he wanted to put it back again. OK, red herring - but it's just not fun, nor is it compulsive.

After exploring the various locations which are graphically average and getting bored picking things up and putting them down to try and get things to happen I started to wonder if I was doing this all wrong. Now I'm certain that it was Orpheus who did it all wrong. They had a good idea, but were completely unable to implement it.

Elite had a great idea with Scooby-Doo but couldn't get it working and shelved it (turn to Hotshots for an update). Orpheus should have done the same thing, perhaps there was too much at stake.